I was searching my email box about the “fence” of the house and surprised to find out how many paper reviews contain the phrase “on the fence”.
2018-12-09
2018-11-24
Objective perception of subjective reality
A core skill, in art, science, or even life, is the ability and willingness to objectively perceive subjective reality.
Notice the swap of the two adjectives. Supposedly, perception is subjective and reality is objective. However, that is a fixed given condition. Our bodies and brains act like filters, so reality is always subjective. What we can strive for is objective perception and depiction of the (given) subjective reality.
For example, in drawing, one has to perceive what is really out there, which can vary depending on the individual subjectivity, in the physical world, in the memory, or in the imagination.
In deriving a math proof or following a scientific argument, one has to rely on what is assumed to be true (axioms, theorems, conjectures) which are subjective by nature.
2018-11-21
Comparing deadlines of various conferences I have submitted to
SIGGRAPH deadline: you are completely dead!
CHI/UIST deadline: you are really dead!
CVPR deadline: you are half dead and can continue to submit supplementary materials like a zombie.
2018-10-27
Academic lineage
My academic lineage traces to Jung and Freud instead of Gauss, Laplace, Newton, or Leibniz.
I guess this partially explains my research interest and mentoring style.
🙂
2018-10-26
Practice shading a color pencil cylinder
Hatching is a core technique to convey shading and texture in sketching.
I have hatched algorithmically so it is only fitting for me to practice manually as well.
This exercise also gave me research ideas which I would not be able to conceive without the artist perspective.
2018-10-08
Commonalities between research and drawing
Both require sighting novel and interesting ideas or scenes. Without this important first step, the rest will fail even with perfect execution.
The author needs to be patient and persevering to complete a sufficiently challenging work without ever giving up.
Strong objectivity is required to help us see the reality without being blinded or obscured by our biases and wishes.
Both are among the few activities (like workout and meditation) that can force me to be present and into the zone.
2018-09-16
Mischiefs with paper author names
MSR Asia single-author challenge
It has been 10 years since I posted up the single-author SIGGRAPH paper challenge to MSR Asia, and nobody has managed to claim the prize as far as I know.
Looking back at my writing, I was wondering who this blunt prick is.
🙂
If I could, I would tell my past self to be more graceful without compromising the strength.
Otherwise, I still stick with, and have faithfully followed by own edicts, after switching into these other roles.
2018-09-03
Writing style for revision control Latex source
Put one, or at most a few, complete sentence(s) into one line.
Latex treats line breaks as spaces, so the compiled document will still have the correct formation.
Since popular revision control tools like git/svn are based on line diff, putting too many sentences in one line will cause excessive revision differences and obscure the actual changes.
Avoid artificial line breaks in the middle of the sentences, which tend to confuse the spell-checkers and the git/svn line diff.